Monday, January 30, 2012

Personal management is the process of planning and fulfilling personal goals for your life. These goals include all pertinent areas of your life, like business, career, family, health, finance, time management and education.

Many people struggle with knowing which of these to do when and how much, without feeling totally overwhelmed and stressed. That is why knowing the one thing to do in any given moment is the true secret of achievement at home and work. That is what personal management is all about.

Brian Tracy addresses this issue in his book entitled, "Focal Point: A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double Your Productivity, and Achieve All Your Goals."

In this article, you will learn some tips from this book to help you develop clarity and satisfaction, both professionally and personally.

Are you frustrated with too many professional and personal demands on your time?

Are you working long hours? Ir the quality of your time at home being affected by the quantity of time you spend at work? Do you feel overwhelmed? Are you unsatisfied and stressed out?

This book proposes that the secret to high achievers is their ability to know their focal point at all times. The focal point, as defined by Tracy, is the one thing you should do to get the best possible outcome at any given moment.

Here are key concepts on personal management covered in this book:

1. You should determine the things you do that give the greatest value to you and your business and spend more time doing those activities. By spending more time doing those things, you will get better at them and it will take less time to accomplish those activities.

2. You should determine the activities that contribute little value to you and your business and make up your mind to either delegate them or eliminate them altogether.

3. Personal management includes continuous learning for personal and professional development to achieve any goal you set.

c. Excellence orientation -- commit to becoming excellent; be in the top 10%

d. Result orientation -- focus on results; successful people are paid for outcomes, not activities

e. Solution orientation -- think about how the problem can be solved, not about who to blame

f. Growth orientation -- become a continuous learner

g. Action orientation -- have a sense of urgency to accomplish your goals

5. Personal management requires a strategic plan for your business and personal life. You will need to identify what things are important, what you will do to achieve your goals, and what steps you will take to accomplish your goals.

6. For personal management to work there are seven things you should make time for every day:

a. Goal setting - what will you accomplish today?

b. Planning and organizing - how will you accomplish those things?

c. Priority setting - when will you accomplish those things?

d. Concentration - focus on the desired outcomes

e. Exercise and nutrition - maintain good health

f. Learning and growth - if you aren't getting better, you are getting worse.

g. Important people in your life - maintain relationships with family and friends

The personal management points covered in this article are worth a second read, particularly when you start to feel overwhelmed and stressed. However, the book, Focal Point, covers these points in more detail and offers a unified approach to accomplishing your goals at home and work. I recommend you read this book. If you do, you will want to re-read it when you start to lose your focus or feel stressed out.

Friday, January 27, 2012

I have received numerous emails and phone calls asking if there are any more government grants for starting or expanding a business. People sometimes state that they have been talking with a government official who told them that there are no government grants anymore. While this isn't surprising to hear it is bothersome because it is simply not true. There are government grants available for starting or expanding a business.

I could list several examples here but frankly that is the information we reserve for our website subscribers. I will share one excellent grant program with you however, the Self Employment Benefit program. Here is a program that will pay you a grant of approximately $450.00 per week while you are preparing your business plan and or operating your business. The grant is payable for a maximum of 52 weeks, 78 weeks if your are a person with a disability.

With programs such as this available, why then are some government officials advising people that there are no grants anymore? There are primarily three reasons:

1) The Specialist - Having been with the Government of Canada for 14 years, I can tell you that bureaucrats are famous or infamous depending upon your perspective, for lacking knowledge of what goes on outside of their own departments/agencies. Often they are not aware of the programs of another division within their own departments. They are not to blame for this however.

Historically, governments have delivered their programs using the "specialist" model whereby an individual can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about his or her area of expertise but precious little about anything else. There have been attempts at using a generalist service delivery model i.e. government employees who have a working knowledge of many programs but lack expertise in any of them. You've probably heard terms such as "the single window approach" being used to explain this philosophy. Unfortunately this approach has been slow to catch on and the specialist method of program delivery is still prevalent. Consequently a government employee may advise you that there are no grants available simply because they don't know the difference.

2) Terminology - I hate to state the obvious, but government terminology is confusing. Many government programs provide funding that is non - repayable but are not called grants. There is a legal basis for this however it is beyond the scope of this article. They are sometimes called "contribution agreements" or some other similar name but the bottom line is they are "non - repayable." The next time you are talking with a government employee, don't ask if there are any grants, ask if there are any non repayable contributions available. You may get a different answer.

3) Third Party Delivery - Some government departments finance third party sectoral or community based organizations to administer funding on their behalf. For example: In British Columbia, Canada there is a company called Forestry Innovation Investment Limited. They provide funding for applied research, product development and international marketing activities. This is not a government department or agency. This is a company that was incorporated under the Company Act of British Columbia but guess what? The Province of British Columbia, as represented by the Minister of Forests, is the sole shareholder of the company.

There is nothing deceptive here on the part of the government. I'm sure they have their reasons for taking this approach to service delivery. The point is if you ask a government employee if the Ministry of Forests provides funding for product development, you may be told, no and technically that would be correct. Forestry Innovation Investment Limited, which is owned by the Ministry of Forests, does provide funding however and that could be the very funding you need for your venture.

I hope I have helped you realize that your search for government funding involves a lot more than asking a government employee if there are any grants available because depending upon who you talk to and the terminology you use, you may come away misinformed.

Sharon Monahan is president of The Business Guide Incorporated. She, is a Business graduate of Memorial University with over 14 years experience in the public sector. She has been personally involved in the assessment and awarding of millions of dollars in government grants. Ms. Monahan left the public service to pursue a career in the private sector.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Without a doubt one of the best ways to build a profitable home business opportunity online is writing your own articles. This may seem hard to do but once you start writing articles for a while it is really quite simple. All you really need to do is read some articles about your business niche and draw some ideas about what you want to write about and basically start writing your article. It does not cost you any money to write an article so you are getting free advertisement for your online business. Plus you are building online real estate for your business because you have created another page to your website.

When you start writing articles on a consistent basis and submitting them to article directories,subscribers to these directories will start reading your articles. The next thing you know the same people who are reading your articles are visiting your website and some of them start generating sales.And what do sales mean? Money in the bank. Always remember that people who read articles are looking for information that interests them so just give them something that will pique that interest. In other words throw a bone at them and see what happens.

Another thing you need to realize is you do not have to be an instant expert on a certain subject. There is no such thing. An expert is someone who has learned by trial and error. So the more you do in your business the more of an expert you become and the more you have to write about. you do not have to be the worlds fastest typist either(although it would be a plus), I type 20 words a minute at the most.

Search engines is another important reason to write articles.Search engines love lots of unique content on web sites so the more articles you write the more content you have on your website. The more unique content you have pointing to your website,the higher the ranking in the search engines for your web site. This is that online real estate I mentioned earlier.The higher you are ranked in the search engines the more traffic you get to your web site and the more sales you get.

So writing articles is a very important part of building a home business opportunity online. But if you do not have time to write an article everyday or you feel you don't have the confidence to write one in the beginning,there is another way get articles written. There are web sites who specialize in writing articles for other people. What they will do is write an article for you and will sell you the rights to that article. You will be branded as the author to that article for a fee. So really, if you want to grow your online business,one of your strategies should be writing articles.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

In today's roller coaster economy more and more people are forced to supplement or replace their income to secure or maintain their current existence. A great majority of them want to establish a home based business.

It has a great appeal because it is not a 9 to 5 job, you are your own boss' your hours are flexible etc.

Among the many choices Internet Marketing is one of the possibilities people are looking at.

Early this year Forbes Magazine predicted that in 2011 75 million home based businesses will start in North America. They also predicted that only 2.3 million ( 3% ) will survive.

Someone must be very careful to choose the right home based business. I myself tried several others before I came upon CCPro and committed myself to it.

So what is CCPro?

CCPro is an Internet marketing education and resources method and is the very best in the planet. Whether you choose to market your own product or one of CCPros, everything you need is there in your BlackBox (what you have to purchase to join) to build a successful business for yourself.

CCPro operates within a unique business model where members are encouraged to share their knowledge with one another in the belief that this will ensure the success of everyone within the community. This approach has proven enormously successful as the achievements of CCPro and its members continue to multiply.

This is why becoming a CCPro member requires both an application and a referral from an already existing member.

As of recently CCPro is available in 175 countries and 42 languages.

In the past few months CCPro established a partnership with David Bach a multiple New York Times best selling author. The result was of the introduction of two new products:

The introductory product - the AMI Foundation membership - is for people who want to finish rich - that is, to learn how to manage their money and accumulate a net worth of at least a million dollars in a given period of time - while continuing at their present jobs or occupations.

PRO U is like your new online learning university. It creates an environment that lets you learn quickly and easily, and gives you the confidence to put your newly acquired skills to work. Published on the same platform that Fortune 500 companies use, PRO U courses are designed to educate to create a successful home business and to teach anyone who wishes to learn how to market anything, anywhere, to anybody - via the internet.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Have you ever met someone who is amazingly talented and highly credentialed in a wide variety of areas? A person who is phenomenal in both the diversity and quality of their work, yet has just never truly achieved success? Someone who may be a gifted artist, an investment pro, graduated from law school, and has people skills galore - yet, they just haven't made it. Have you ever wondered why? Perhaps this is you. Why, with all the resources and skills at your disposal have you not found success?

Success is a result of knowing where you want to go, creating a specific roadmap to get you there and having the discipline to stay on track.

Individuals and organizations fail to achieve success because they have never done the work of defining who they are or what they do and then sticking with it. People fail to succeed for the same reason businesses do; they are not focused in the way they invest scarce resources. Each person or business has only a limited amount of time, energy and capital to use pursuing their goals and dreams.

Most fabulously talented people fail because they don't set limits. Have you met someone who has three or four different business cards? They are so busy doing a little of everything they never shine at any one thing. In order to succeed, you must select some one thing to be the vehicle of your success. You can't be committed to two visions any more than you can drive two cars at one time.

Crafting an effective mission statement provides the framework for using resources in ways that will best support all your efforts to achieve the goals you set. Individuals, families, churches, charities and businesses all benefit from well thought-out summaries of who they are, what they do and why they do it.

Establish your vision. If you don't know where you want to go, just how do you propose to get there? Do you really want to entrust your future to nothing more than luck? If so, quit reading and go buy a lottery ticket.

Once you have a vision, specifically outline the process of attaining it. Set a series of goals, beginning with step one and continuing all the way to where your vision becomes your reality. Vision and goals are useless without discipline. Stay focused. Invest your resources only in ways that achieve set goals; using each dollar, hour or calorie wisely to get you closer to your vision and not wasted on impulsive activity.

Another aspect to achieving success is being realistic. What are you really willing to change? What are you truly able to change? What are you willing to do? What are you willing to risk?

Set yourself up to succeed. Identify smaller goals and gradually build a foundation of success. As that foundation gets stronger you can increase your expectations, expand your vision and build as high as you can imagine. Even though each step won is a small one, they eventually combine, serving as your road to the top.

Success isn't really all that complicated if you remember that Vision gives you direction, Focus determines the method, and Discipline makes it happen.

Lynn Baber is a Christian writer, recovering business consultant and retired equine professional. She shares lessons learned in thirty-five years at the business table and round pen with her clients and readers. Highly credentialed in issues of leadership, customer relations and most things equine, Lynn has a unique perspective not found elsewhere. Whether the topic is customer service or training stallions, Lynn brings years of experience to presentations and articles. Lynn is the author of two books, the latest scheduled for release next spring.